Memento Mori

Decluttering before we first moved in together,

my lover asked herself, Do I want to take this

with me into the ground? At her funeral, visitors

would marvel at the glittering open casket, her precious

body cradled in a bed of shining trinkets. Nestled

against her elbow, a crystal sphere arcs rainbows

over the tufted satin lid, into its gathered ruched

shadows. She has been dressed in a charcoal

suit, well-tailored, the one I chose; her face a rose, mortician-

pinked in her natural sweep of blush. She’d explained

to me as we packed that day how her mother had said,

Your father gave me this—and handed my love

a figurine, a glass flower, an egg, a goose—before he died.

And my beloved took them, one by one, into her gentle

palms, each talisman filling shelves and boxes

even now. I have just as many. Her body floats,

a buoyant skiff in a pool of fragile, shining things:

the golden curl on a Fabergé egg echoes a single ringlet

cast across her brow. Because someone purchased

a small token of love and because she accepted, now,

at her side, I am moved to take each knickknack in my hands,

one by one. I press into my palm the rounded star

of a glass poinsettia, feel the pistil’s yellow nudge, then slip it in

my pocket. A thumb-sized teddy bear grasps a spray

of baby’s breath, a porcelain turtle grins from its amber-green

shell. I need them. I am now causing a scene, wanting

only something to remember her by, just a few

things to take into the ground with me, just something

to remind me, when I hold it, firm in my sweating palm,

that she held it, too, that she was once as solid

as a glazed clay frog, that we were once

so in love I could sit in her palm to be adored.